Saturday, December 24, 2016

Those photos from Ankara, with the Russian ambassador lying dead on the floor? They're haunting, and not just because they depict an atrocity. They're haunting because they are more beautiful than they should be. They are so beautiful they seem wrong. I wrote a little about it for Hyperalleric—you can find it here. It's about seeing things as aesthetic objects, and the inhumanity of that under certain circumstances. Or maybe it's better to say that it's about how beauty can be a scandal.

Sunday, December 18, 2016

Whatever the reason—his insightful writing on Polish literature for the TLS, his poems, or the kind of courtesy he showed when we both tried to get into the same taxi on a cold Belgian morning 20 years ago—I've long admired Piotr Gwiazda. And now he's said some kind things about my book of poems and literary oddities, The Kafka Sutra. He's said them in the latest issue of The Chicago Review. His piece begins this way:

Robert Archambeau’s new book of poems The Kafka Sutra differs from
his previous book Home and Variations (2004) in the degree to which it
explores the possibilities of appropriation as a literary device. Appropriation,
moreover, becomes a hermeneutic tool in Archambeau’s hands. A poet and a
critic—the author of Laureates and Heretics (2010), The Poet Resigns (2013),
and the forthcoming Making Nothing Happen—he employs it to compose
his poems and to perform criticism on his textual sources. Entertaining and
intelligent, The Kafka Sutra shows Archambeau’s in-depth engagement with
this widespread, increasingly dominant poetic practice.
The title sequence at first quite implausibly grafts several of Kafka’s
enigmatic parables onto the subject matter of the Hindu classic KamaSutra. Describing it elsewhere as “one of the odder things [he’s] done,”
Archambeau promises, at least in theory, a merging of existential anxiety,
sensual fulfillment, and didactic intent. The result is indeed odd, but not
entirely foreign to anyone who has ever had the experience of reading
creatively more than one book at a time. The sequence is also disarmingly
playful and funny, as are the accompanying illustrations by Sarah Conner.

Friday, December 02, 2016

Rejoice! This troubled world has been blessed with two new lights in the darkness—the latest issues of The Battersea Review and Plume.

The sixth issue of The Battersea Review (proud Associate Editor: me) is a special Spanish number, edited by Mario Murgia and Flamminia Ocampo. The contents are almost too substantial for the internet to bear:

In the "Essays and Comments" section I edit for Plume, you'll find "Confessions of a Contest Junkie," in which Amish Trivedi takes us through his travails and triumphs as a recidivist participant in the world of poetry contests. It begins like this:

If you have any vice or addiction in your life – and we all
have something – you probably already know that what you are hooked on is bad
for you. You already know how you justify your fix. You know how you feed your
high. And yet, you cling to your degeneracy, denying it is a problem. Your
enablers support your actions and claims.

My
vice? Poetry contests. And the system itself is my enabler— a system which has
encouraged me and so many others through the hope that maybe something will
work

In the poetry
contest system there are winners. Judges whittle submissions down to a select
few, a single one of whom sees a poem, a chapbook, or an entire book lauded.
The winners add another publication to their record. The press or journal
heralds the winner and their own selection skills. The win takes on a life of
its own, serving as the launch pad for a career or a stepping stone on the path
to tenure. Pierre Bourdieu points out that perhaps this initial social capital
gain is accidental before it leads to other things, but that’s for another
time.